This is the 6th post in the Hibernate hard facts focus series. In this article, I will show you how to use the fetch profile feature introduced in Hibernate 3.5. Lazy loading is a core feature in Hibernate: it saves memory space. The reasoning behind it is, if you don’t use an association, you don’t need the object and thus, Hibernate does not load it into memory. Hibernate fills the lazy loaded attribute with a proxy that makes the SQL request when the getter is called.